AllenLowe

as I like to say, "the more Yanow the less you want."

I think it would be a nice thing.

thanks, yeah, Grievin' Blues is the deepest stuff I've ever heard. Beware the original Savoy CD reissue where they really botched the sound - I found a Euro version in which they didn't go crazy on denoising.

so where does the stuff issued on Savoy originate? I love that period.

I heard Amram play a few times (he used to sit in with Joe Albany) - and listened to that album - I have no doubt he is completely sincere, but he's not in any real sense a jazz musician. He's had an interesting life, and I don't know his compositional work, however.

what a brilliant pianist. A little wild and crazy. I wish I'd asked Bill Triglia about him. Btw there's a terrific interview with Tinney in some old issue of Cadence.

well, I hope so, because his playing drives me nuts. It's like watching someone paint, but not a picture, just a wall. Though I am running out of metaphors.

I get the same feeling from Jamal's playing that I get from Brubeck (though I hear far more possibilities in Jamal). I keep saying to myself "when is the music gonna start?" It's like he's got one foot nailed to the floor and he keeps walking in circles.

Percy was one of those guys who was determinedly "local," whatever that means in NYC. He went to Europe a few times, but also turned down, as I recall, a few more substantial opportunities.

that's right; I would say yes on The Killing Man, but it doesn't leap out at me like the other.

that first one is definitely Percy. and so is the snippet at the end. I am certain; his tone sounds sometimes like someone inhaling. That's him.

not only was Powell's wife driving, but according to what Curley Russell told me, everyone knew she was a terrible driver and warned them not to let her take the wheel.

just to mention, in regard to the casual put-down of Nat Phipps in that article as being middle-class/stodgy. Phipps is an absolutely great pianist. Really unusually good.

well, my experience with academia is nothing but bad - the comments to an NEH proposal I wrote, reviewed by academics, referred to me disparagingly as a "hobbyist" because I had no PHD; last year I started attending some events hosted by the Yale Black Students Music Archives group, all of which appeared, in their promotion, to be public. Finally Daphne Brooks, a PHD fool who was running the program, asked me to leave. It was odd, because I never made a single comment but she knows me from some conferences etc and I have a feeling she was worried because I knew so much more about the subject than she did (I had attended one of her previous lectures in which some academic was speaking on gospel music and made such a bizarre and obvious mistake that I HAD to say something, though of course it did no good). At the various EMP Pop Conferences I attended the academics treated me like I was some kind of leper, so I stopped attending. My experience, when it comes to the history and cultural side of the music, is that academics tend to have an authoritarian mentality, meaning they do not believe in free speech or in academic freedom if it contradicts their own beliefs.

since I am the least-known leader there is, my Knitting Factory recording with Doc Cheatham and David Murray probably qualifies - https://allenlowe.bandcamp.com/track/mental-strain-at-dawn-3

I have the sneaking suspicion that all of this is happening as a job action. I sent out something 10 days ago to someone who has yet to receive it. I smell a deliberate slow down.

Nobody seems to remember any more, but Harold Vick, who was a great looking guy, was in a commercial for a bank - can't remember which one - in the '70s. I remember seeing him one night and he was talking about how he was able buy a Mercedes with his earnings.

is all this crap a new trend, since out virus troubles started? Because in about 30 years of selling and shipping things I have had maybe 2 problems. As I have a new project that will go media in August, I am now very nervous. Since we know the p.o. is now having business and political problems. Oi.

I once yelled "theater" in a crowded fire. That's my right as an American. But all seriousness aside, as Steve Allen used to say, if we had paid attention in January, locked everything down, helped people to survive economically through the quarantine, then we would be very close to normal life. Denmark did this, sanely and humanely, and they are very close to normal.

maybe; hence all these modules that are supposed to add the "warmth of analog" to digital recordings. I am sure someone could explain the science better than I can, but yes, analog recording is still an analog to reality, not reality. And of course not all analog recording equipment is equal. At the end of the day, yes, it is subjective, and it depends on what you want in a recording. To me, if the recording is of a group of performers standing or sitting around, I want it to replicate, as closely as possible, the "live" experience of sound as it travels and clashes harmonically and has depth. To me analog, in its highest state, is still best at this. Though the way things are historically, all these points are moot. Analog tape is not coming back (or at least I don't think it is). So what I try to deal with when I record is the problem of multi-tracking and isolation, and the way in which such isolation is destructive - it takes all of the air/space out of a recording, and I have never, to this day, after about 20+ CDs, ever recorded with isolation (or compression).

this is missing the point; if you transfer an analog original to digital, yes, then the analog wave form can be perfectly replicated; but what you are replicating is the original analog sound. That is MUCH different than making a digital original. All else being equal - digital original at 24 bit; well-maintained analog machine at 15 IPS, no noise reduction - I prefer analog. I realize how subjective it can be. The other weird thing, and this is from someone who has been recording things for about 40 years; what I miss about analog is that with it you could stick a mic in front of a bunch of players and, if the recorder was good, get amazingly good sound and balance with very little effort. This is much harder to achieve with digital; hard to explain but it is prone to more unpleasant distortion and it is just harder to achieve a natural air-like acoustic balance. This, too, has improved with 24 bit, however. And I miss some of the really terrific cassette recorders I used over the years, some of which sounded incredibly clean and warm.

I love tape, but my repair guy died about 10 years ago, and finding someone good to do maintenance is too much of a pain. To this day (and last time I said something like this here I was accused of being a flat-earther) I truly believe that tape, properly maintained and at the right speed and without noise reduction, has a greater depth-of-field than digital, though this is much less of a problem than, digitally-speaking, it used to be.

things are moving along and I just got this nice blurb from Robin D.G. Kelley: "In his most ambitious book to date, Allen Lowe proves Ralph Ellison’s claim that the whole of our nation’s culture—particularly its music—was built on and blended with what enslaved Africans and their descendants created on these shores. And he pulls no punches and leaves no stone unturned. In nuanced, entertaining, and often audacious prose, Lowe deploys his encyclopedic knowledge to unearth an elusive history of race and American music, unbounded by genre, geography or time. Readers be warned: fasten your seatbelts, adjust your hearing, and prepare to forget everything you know. " -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

I have been told that Phil, who has had a recurring cancer thing going on, is sick again.

I was about to say this; sounds to me like there are two different altos; the first solo is older-styled, has some Benny Carter-like feel to it; 2nd seems more of a bebopper.